What if?
"Unpretentiously Incomplete," Susan Brown
“Imagining the impossible is what people have been doing in the struggle for liberation. That’s what it is…And quite often some of that possibility doesn’t even seem realizable until, for example, artists have helped people kind of open their imaginations to what can be done…art enables your mind and heart to open, to sense, even if you can’t quite explain the possibilities for different configurations of human and resource interaction.” -Ruth Wilson Gilmore
As the abolitionist and critical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore instructs, imagination is the work of liberation. In order to make the world more just and more humane, we must first imagine it so. Artists play a crucial role in the imaginative work of liberation as they make real the alternative histories and new possibilities that might make up our world. Sometimes these imaginations take the form of delightful mindscapes, fantastical creatures, or new horizons. Always they embody the rich imagination of the artist who uses the canvas to quite literally change the world.
The artists featured here take up Gilmore’s charge and ask the crucial question–what if? What if the world around them was more colorful, more vibrant, and more playful? What if the world they see in their dreams was the one their waking selves could inhabit? What if they could go back in time and change a crucial decision? What if they could see beyond the physical horizon and beyond the prison walls? What if the barriers that seem impermeable are anything but? These artists encourage us to ask “what if?” as well and challenge us to answer it with as much creativity and inventiveness that they do. In so doing, we might all enlist in the work of liberation.
By: Nora Krinitsky
